Leclerc Tank

French Politics, 2005, 3, (187–210) r 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3419/05 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/fp Articles The Invention of the Leclerc Tank: The Singular Role of a Project Elite William Genieys and Laura Michel CEPEL; University of Montpellier 1, 39, rue de l’Universite´ , Montpellier, CDX 34060, France. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] In contrast to the abundant Anglo-American literature, little research exists in France on defense policy in general and arms procurement decisions in particular. If we seek to import models from the English-language literature, we are led to investigate the presence of a ‘military–industrial complex’in France. Through the study of a specific armament policy, the development and production of the Leclerc main battle tank, we rule out the existence of a ‘conscious, coherent, and conspiratorial’elite. Behind this programme, we do indeed find an elite group, but its existence is a result of the programme itself. Owing to the cold war context and the Gaullist policy of national autonomy, a group of actors benefited from relative autonomy to set down the bases of a belief in the necessity and possibility of building the best tank in the world. The programme and the elite group that sponsored it reinforced each other and succeeded in sustaining the Leclerc project after the end of the cold war context that had initially justified it. The formation of programmatic elites of this kind is one of the characteristics of the new democratic governance. French Politics (2005) 3, 187–210. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200086 Keywords: defense policy; military–industrial complex; programmatic elite Introduction If there is one field of study that the social sciences in France have neglected in particular it is that of the military (Caplow and Vennesson, 2000; Revue franc¸aise de sociologie, 2003). In this country, it is as if defence matters in general, and arms policies in particular, have escaped the scrutiny of research, and this despite their importance for state power in Western Europe (Tilly, 1990). For this reason, arms policies as a subject for public policy analysis and an instrument for studying the state remain a black box. This article attempts to shed some light on the subject by analysing the controversial and highly symbolic procurement of the Leclerc tank. We use this as a means of investigating the sociological dynamics at the heart of French military equipment policy-making (Genieys, 2004). Such a research perspective involves William Genieys and Laura Michel Invention of the Leclerc Tank 188 uncovering the role of the actors and interest groups who participate in the making of an arms policy. North American and British empirically informed research on arms procurement most frequently takes one of two forms. The first draws its inspiration from the theory of the ‘militaro-industrial complex’, which postulates a high level of cooperation, or even collusion, between leading military and industrial actors (Wright Mills, 1956). In constrast, the second is driven by a paradigm of ‘bureaucratic politics’, which sees the state as made up of a plurality of actors that can only be studied using organisational analysis (Allison, 1971). In stressing the importance of sectoral elites, our approach used in studying the acquisition of the Leclerc tank is located at the frontier between these two schools of thought. Expanding on the critical reflections of Suzanne Keller on what goes on ‘beyond the state’(1963) and in particular on the dual process of social differentiation and bureaucratisation, we show that the reality of power in the policy area we study is held by a ‘strategic elite’able to act upstream of the more general ‘power elite’, largely by influencing the choice of policies. We further develop the notion that, beyond the well known ‘grand corps’, we can see, in France, the development of elite groups built around the defence of specific programmes. The case of this piece of military hardware is also interesting because it has been presented by its promoters as ‘the best tank in the world’, a description that its detractors see instead as its biggest flaw. This apparent paradox can only be understood by placing this example of French military procurement within the historical context of the ‘golden age of the state’, which lasted from 1945 to 1974 (Suleiman and Courty, 1997). At that time, political commitment to national independence and grandeur often found its expression in the undertaking of large technology-based programmes such as Concorde, ‘le plan cable’, and nuclear power stations — a policy that Cohen has labelled ‘high-tech Colbertism’(Cohen, 1996). In addition, arms policy-making during the period when the Leclerc was designed followed from a sectoral cognitive frame within which technological advances were supposed to compensate for the numerical inferiority of the French army with regard to the two superpowers. In turn, this sectoral cognitive frame fit well with a more global frame within which France was to be rapidly modernized with the help of the state (Jobert and Muller, 1987). The Leclerc programme thus was linked to the guiding rationality of a medium-sized country driven by a Gaullist vision of independence. As it happened, however, the launch of the production phase of the Leclerc coincided with the fall of the Berlin wall and the dawn of an altogether new strategic era. How, in this new context, could a weapons system intended to face invading Warsaw Pact forces be justified? An analysis inspired by the realist paradigm of international relations would have justified its cancellation. In fact, it is impossible to understand an armament policy of this magnitude French Politics 2005 3 William Genieys and Laura Michel Invention of the Leclerc Tank 189 without looking more closely at the actors involved. At the highest levels of the state, these actors first proposed and backed the project, and then pushed through the decision to move to full-scale production in the 1990s, just as the strategic context was changing radically. Our purpose is to show that this self- proclaimed ‘French success story’is closely linked to the role played by an elite group that not only imposed its views but defined its collective identity around and through this programme. Significantly, we suggest that this elite group is itself a product of the Leclerc programme; it did not exist at the programme’s inception. Our hypothesis is thus quite different from that of the ‘military– industrial complex’(Thie ´ bault, 1983). Rather than the product of a pre- existing integrated elite consensus, the policy that led to the construction of the Leclerc tank can be seen as the result of strategic interactions between sectoral elites and their respective logics of action, the hierarchy of the terrestrial army (EMAT), the arms commissioning wing of the Ministry of Defence — the Direction ge´ne´rale de l’armement (DGA) — and the Groupement des industries de l’armement terrestre (GIAT, which was a state industry) on the one hand, and the decision-making bodies within the remainder of the state on the other. Strategic interaction between a military elite seeking the ultimate weapon (those who define operational requirements) and armament-production engineers claiming leading-edge technical expertise (those who translate operational needs into technological projects) would seem central to under- standing observed outcomes. This limited vision, however, is insufficient to explain how a broader agreement was reached, bringing together an extremely heterogeneous set of actors around the Leclerc project. The dynamic leading to the elaboration of such a compromise, on the other hand, is at the heart of the ‘sociology of translation’(Callon and Latour, 1991). It is through this approach, accordingly, as well as the sociology of elites (Genieys, 2000), that we seek to shed light on the political and social elements that led to the invention of the Leclerc tank. In other words, based upon an empirical study,1 this article sets out to show how the Leclerc project was indissociable from the work of a small group of actors within the arms sector who progressively formed an elite devoted to the promotion of a particular project. In this perspective, the progressive construction of a belief in the creation of the ‘best tank in the world’as the structuring element of a small elite group provides the key elements that allow us to understand how this project came to be viewed as a ‘success’. Towards the Invention of the Best Tank in the World It is important to stress from the outset that the conception and promotion of the Leclerc project are indissociable from the work of a small group of actors in French Politics 2005 3 William Genieys and Laura Michel Invention of the Leclerc Tank 190 the armaments sector. This group gradually assumed a central role in the legitimation of this project by spreading a belief in ‘the best tank in the world’ throughout the highest levels of the state. A mixture of supposed imperatives and the quest for ‘the best weapons’(Kaldor, 1982), this belief in the Leclerc allowed it to be kept alive despite the radical transformation of the geostrategic context and of the very cognitive framework underlying French, and indeed Western, defence policy. The work on the sociology of innovation done by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour allows us to understand the concomitant structuring of this project and the heterogeneous network that sustained it (Callon and Latour, 1991). What we must examine is how the Leclerc project resulted from a process of translation in which the simultaneous definition of problems and solutions rallied the interest and thus the support of a certain number of actors from the military, scientific, ‘new technologies’and political worlds.

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